Over the years, American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift has impressed legions of followers to fervently dissect her music lyrics for particular clues about her private life and relationships.
And now they’ll do it for school credit score, because the University of Texas at Austin launches a new undergraduate course referred to as The Taylor Swift Songbook.
English professor Elizabeth Scala can be educating it as a part of the college’s liberal arts honours programme.
In a press launch on its web site, the college famous that Swift’s songs will present a “distinctly up to date lens” to the research of literary traditions and types, alongside the extra historic works of William Shakespeare, Robert Frost and John Keats.
Prof Scala famous that the course is a new manner to expose formal literary criticism to youthful individuals.
She mentioned: “I need to take what Swift followers can already do at a complicated degree, tease it out for them a bit with a unique vocabulary, after which present them how, in truth, Swift attracts on richer literary traditions in her songwriting, each topically but additionally formally in phrases of how she makes use of references, metaphors and intelligent manipulations of phrases.”
This just isn’t the primary college course impressed by the 32-year-old pop star.
Earlier this yr, New York University’s Clive Davis Institute launched a course about her life and profession as a “inventive music entrepreneur”.
It culminated in Swift herself exhibiting up on the college’s graduation ceremony in May to obtain an honorary doctorate, and ship a speech to her “fellow” graduates.
“I began writing songs once I was 12 and since then, it has been the compass guiding my life, and in flip, my life guided my writing,” she famous in her speech.
“Everything I do is simply an extension of my writing, whether or not it is directing movies or a brief movie, creating the visuals for a tour, or standing on stage performing. Everything is linked by my love of the craft.”
Elsewhere in Texas, undergraduates at Texas State University can have the chance to research one other pop star – English singer Harry Styles, previously of boy band One Direction.
The course, titled Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity: Identity, the Internet and European Pop Culture, is anticipated to start subsequent yr. – The Straits Times/Asia News Network
